You probably already know this; a large percentage of your potential patients prefer to visit your website rather than call the front desk for information or to set up an appointment.
So what does this mean to you? Well, it’s pretty simple – your chiropractor website needs to be up to the task of making it easy for people to come to your website and quickly find the information they need.
The internet can be a very competitive place, and it can be difficult for your website to stand out against your competitors. Getting potential patients to your chiropractor website is only half the battle. The harder part is how to keep your website visitors engaged once they are on your site.
“You have less than 3 seconds to convince potential patients that your practice is right for them.”
According to researchers at Missouri University, visitors spend about 2.6 seconds on a site before deciding whether or not they want to stay on that particular website.
So your website needs to quickly grab their attention, get your message across, and demonstrate that your chiropractic business is the solution they’re looking for all within that time frame.
You also need to ensure that your site is rich in content and at the same time, incredibly easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices. If your website doesn’t provide a good user experience, it will end up costing you potential patients.
Now, let’s proceed with the tips!
1. Super Easy Navigation
First off, it’s in your best interest to ensure that your site is easy to navigate. In essence, it should be designed in such a way that visitors will be able to find what they need in minutes if not seconds. Remember the 3 seconds rule — most visitors will waste no time to hit the back button if they find that your navigation menu is way too complicated.
What You Should Avoid
- Complicated site menus that make it hard to find relevant information
- Do not use uncommon abbreviations and acronyms
- Avoid having multiple layers of menus
Best Practices to Follow
- Ensure super easy navigation — it’s great to position it across the top of the website or down the left-hand side.
- Try to reduce the number of menu items; ideally, you should have seven or fewer to avoid overloading people with too many choices
- Design your logo in such a way that it navigates back to your chiropractic website’s homepage
- Only use descriptive titles when naming your sections
2. Create Relevant Content
As you already know, content is king. The process of building a patient-friendly cannot be complete without useful content.
For the most part, you should focus on creating engaging content that your audience will want to read. Among other elements, you want to use catchy headlines, high-quality visuals, and up to date information.
Most importantly, try to make your content easy to find and share. Proofing your content before posting it is also vital. If your content is full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, it can reflect poorly on your business. I would recommend using a service like Grammarly to proof your content before posting it online.
What To Avoid
- Sharing irrelevant posts
- Publishing outdated content on your site
- Creating content that’s difficult to read and follow
- Having product or services pages with little text
Best Practices to Follow
- Craft posts that provide answers to common questions
- Publish only fresh and relevant content
- Always check for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes
- Create content with SEO in mind — always include relevant keywords
3. Ensure Readability
According to research by Nielsen Norman Group, most website visitors read just 28% of a site’s content. That said, you won’t be wrong to ensure that visitors can grasp information with little to no effort. In essence, it’s critical to make your website to be as scannable as can be.
What To Avoid
- Overstuffing your website with text and visuals
- Excessive use of colors — doing this may distract potential patients
- Using fonts that are way too small
- Using different designs for every web page
Best Practices to Follow
- Stick with simple fonts — they’re easier to read
- Try to use contrasting colors for both text and background
- Never fail to format your content — this is crucial
If you look at this blog post, for instance, it is broken down in chunks of information to make it easier to digest.
“According to The Nielsen Norman Group, users only read about 20 percent of the text on an average page. That does not leave a lot of opportunity to make an impression!”
I have used lots of headlines, bullet points and bolded text so that visitors who are quickly skimming the page can gauge what the post is about and if it contains useful information that is relevant to them. if it does, they will probably slow down and take the time to read the post in more detail.
Google and other major search engines pay attention to how fast people give up on your site and readable websites tend to rank higher in search engine results. Users come back to sites that feel accessible. When you make your content readable, therefore, more people are likely to find and use it.
4. Reduce Page Load Time
Ever given thought to how users feel about slow page load time? Well, you should be aware that most people can’t stand even one-second delay.
Essentially, page load time is one of the many factors that can affect the overall performance of your chiropractor site — it can even ruin your chances of converting highly engaged potential patients.
“Research by Akamai pointed out that over forty percent of visitors will hit the back button if a webpage takes more than three seconds to load.”
The bottom line; a slow loading web page will only hurt user experience. So try your best to speed things up!
What to Avoid
- Using images that are too large
- Having excessive Javascript, images and CSS files
- Ignoring the importance of browser caching
Best Practices to Follow
- Compress heavy images to decrease load time
- Get rid of pictures and videos that may be increasing load time
- Take full advantage of browser caching — use it to store cached versions of static resources
- Remove unnecessary plugins
5. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Here’s the thing; potential patients are more likely to interact with a site that works well on their smartphones or tablets.
“According to a study from Google, approximately 65% of online searches begin on a mobile device.”
What’s more, other studies indicate that a significant percentage of patients who search for medical websites usually schedule an appointment. That said, it’s incredibly important to build your site in such a way that it easily adjusts to mobile devices. Failure to do this will create a poor user experience, and that’s terrible for your practice.
Besides losing potential patients, Google also frowns at websites that are not optimized for mobile devices. Why? Well, it’s only because such sites only create an unpleasant user experience. All in all, it’s in your best interest to keep up with the mobile trend and of course, work towards meeting the needs of your potential and existing patients.
What to Avoid
- Posting content that’s difficult to read
- Failing to test the site on several different mobile devices
- Ignoring the need to design for touch functionality
- Excessive use of large images that may affect the speed of your website
Best Practices to Follow
- Stick to a clean and simple design
- Ensure that the text is brief and relevant
- Design the site with easy navigation in mind
- Be sure that your icons are relevant to the needs of your visitors
So now what? Well, it’s time to follow these proven tips and start increasing your chances of taking your chiropractor websites content to the next level. If you would like to learn how we can help implement these tips on your website to improve your visitors user experience please contact us using the form below.